Reader tired of world's conflict and inequality

I'm weary of conflict. I'm not alone. The world is exhausted. Constant disputes and arguments and opposition produce nothing of value. There's no letup, no pause for reflection about what our conflicts are creating. It goes against advancement and evolution. It defies logic and common sense. It flies in the face of what we see with our eyes and know in our minds to be true.

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seacoastonline.com

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Posted Dec. 7, 2013 at 2:00 AM

Posted Dec. 7, 2013 at 2:00 AM

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Dec. 1 — To the Editor:

I'm weary of conflict. I'm not alone. The world is exhausted. Constant disputes and arguments and opposition produce nothing of value. There's no letup, no pause for reflection about what our conflicts are creating. It goes against advancement and evolution. It defies logic and common sense. It flies in the face of what we see with our eyes and know in our minds to be true.

Yet, humans insist on "making progress" by seizing, by tearing down and by ripping apart.

Onward we march to snatch, grab and wrench from others things we convince ourselves are ours and only ours, or should be.

You won't believe me just because I say it's so. A glance back indisputably proves the reasoning.

Nature is our guidance system. We are part of nature. It shows repeatedly that things that flourish, that advance, that produce variations, are the result of cooperation at the biological and molecular levels of what we call existence. New evidence is showing that Charles Darwin was only partly right. Yet, humans continue to use "survival of the fittest" as their battle cry.

What if we change that to survival of the most cooperative? That could take us into new thought patterns we've always been too busy fighting to consider. The paradox: we help ourselves at the expense of others, but help others and we help ourselves in multiples.

"There's only one truth" is a lie. We want to believe that, but it doesn't hold up. I'm not speaking here about gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. You tell me the sky is blue. That's your truth. I argue and tell you the sky is grayish blue. That's my truth. Neither is wrong. To you, a zebra appears to have black stripes alternated with white stripes. I, being more correct than you, inform you that zebras have white stripes separated by black. To each of us, our "truth" is right.

The oil under our lands and oceans has been there for millennia. Some believe it's theirs because they spent (other people's) money finding it, bringing it up, refining it, then selling it to us at whatever price suits their whims today. The fact that the oil is under others' land is of little consequence. That's their "truth." We, on the other hand, are royals whose great-great-grandfather was bigger and brawnier and claimed all the land to be his. He laid down the law.

He believed the oil was his because he won a war over you and the oil is under the land you live on. In truth, a royal is that only because an ancestor declared himself to be a royal by taking possession of where you now live. Hmm.

Don't believe our planet's resources were put where they are for enrichment of a few individuals. Deep down (but never publicly) even they might assent to the nonsense of that "truth."

And this: It's incredulous that financial institutions can operate on a playing field that's totally different from the one the rest of us must play on. Their truth is that "legally" creating money from nothing is good. For them, it is, though it seems to treat others with contempt. Our truth is that if it's really good, legal and beneficial, why can't you and I do it? Why can those who control the wealth write laws of money for others that always are different than theirs? Why do these laws always benefit them and never us? This doesn't seem to fit the "all are created equal" truism. Or, maybe, that isn't true.